Public television channel France 2 this autumn showed ordinary company employees working hard for little money just what they are missing out on. Its Envoyé Spécial programme shadowed Sophie, the ‘chief happiness officer’ at a Parisian start-up selling handmade clothes. Her job, a US invention, is to create a good office atmosphere, build team spirit and motivate the staff to work harder, by organising lunches, parties and outings. The programme showed Sophie starting the day with an office breakfast provided by the company, then going out to buy food for a team barbecue. The documentary makers seemed mesmerised by the managerial cheerfulness around the company’s 50 employees.

The more conditions for the majority of workers deteriorate, the more the media seem fascinated by the abundance of perks offered to a lucky few. This April, at the height of protests against France’s new labour law, and amidst rising exasperation at the lack of job security and proliferation of ‘bullshit’ jobs, the BFM Business channel’s Happy Boulot (Happy Job) programme was completely out of touch with social reality, worrying that employers were being driven to excesses of generosity.

Its host said: ‘The number of vacancies for chief happiness officers in France on the Qapa job search site has grown 1,000% in the last two years ... If a company executive with high-level skills in IT, finance or accounting goes on the job market today, they usually have a choice of at least three job offers. What makes them choose one job over another is what the company has to offer apart from the satisfaction of the job itself, the pay and the bonuses. In other words it’s the cherry on the cake ... People get used to comfort: no matter how much they have, they always want more.So the danger is that companies will run out of ideas for ways to be nice.’ Trade unionists rarely use bosses’ tendency to spoil their staff as an angle of attack.

The fashion for ‘workplace wellbeing’ doesn’t only benefit elite graduates of business schools. Some benefits do trickle down, according to Christian Barqui, head of the Association Progrès du Management and CEO of salad-packer Florette (1,500 employees, six factories, turnover €200m). Barqui, an advocate of lean management — based on the Toyota group’s approach to enhancing productivity and refined at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) — told Le Figaro in September that he believed in ‘theories that encourage people to work flexibly … We must do everything possible to ensure that our colleagues are able to use their intelligence and find their own balance.’ But he stressed that ‘a business enterprise cannot be a democracy.’

A nap on a Fatboy beanbag

Asked what he had done to promote wellbeing in his factories, he said he had, for example, ‘set up a nap room furnished with Fatboy beanbags. I have one in my office.’ Besides the 20-minute daily nap that employees are allowed in return for greater productivity, the company offers yoga classes every Monday and reflexology every other Friday. These may help to keep the workforce in good condition but they aren’t free: the employee pays 75% of the cost. And there aren’t any team barbecues or concierges to organise outings to the theatre. Even when a company is generous, factory hands can’t expect the same treatment as the privileged few who work for start-ups.

The media focus on staff perks is not just a harmless result of French entrepreneur Pierre Gattaz’s statement that ‘business leaders are heroes’ — it underlines a division in the world of work. There is an elite which enjoys a decent income and benefits that build team spirit; this includes the last few workers with real security and no fear of the future, benefiting from a balance of power that is favourable to their interests. Then there are the masses on the labour market, who can no longer strictly be called employees because there are now so many cheapened forms of employment that strip workers of their status and rights as salaried employees — internships, temporary work, temporary fee-paid work, self-employment, sandwich courses, customary contracts, variable hours contracts, fixed-term part-time contracts, paid voluntary work.

The conditions for workers who move from job to job in services are deteriorating at the same rate as those for statutory employees — who in principle are luckier, although workplace wellbeing for them often means nothing more than hoping they will escape serious damage from managerial techniques designed to wring them dry. The lean management Barqui is so proud of is noted less for foot massages than for burnouts in enterprises and public services that have adopted it, such as the French postal service and hospitals. At the university hospital centre in Toulouse, where the emphasis on cutting costs has led the management to adopt the Toyota approach, four members of the nursing staff killed themselves this summer.

People get used to comfort ... the danger is that companies will run out of ideas for ways to be nice

The focus on wellbeing is also a sign of another divide. Don Winslow’s 2005 thriller The Power of the Dog, based on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s war on drugs, describes how a powerful Mexican drug cartel adopts a new management structure in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The head of the cartel, based on Joaquín Guzmán Loera, aka El Chapo, of the Sinaloa cartel, is presented as a pioneer of neoliberalism, turning his army of thugs on a monthly payroll into a network of small independent entrepreneurs, bound to him by a simple — though inviolable — oath of allegiance. The character explains to one of his lieutenants that the cartel needs entrepreneurs because employees cost money, while entrepreneurs make money. It’s uncertain whether this conversation took place in real life, but it seems quite plausible that a murderous drug lord was also a pioneer of enforced self-employment.

The French government has encouraged the extension of a similar regime to nearly a million workers. The self-employed, who must pay their own social security contributions and are at the mercy of ‘client’ employers not answerable for their fate, are highly exposed in a fragmented workforce where it’s everyone for themselves. In this model, mutual aid and solidarity only survive on the margins. Just a few white-collar workers who get the ‘wellbeing’ treatment experience the values of comradeship, sense of class belonging and team spirit. This may be the future — a world where there the concept of team cannot exist without the magic effected by a chief happiness officer.